A History of Future Cities

by Daniel Brook (Norton)

In the nineteen-seventies, the sheikh of Dubai told urban planners how they could insure the city’s future as a global center: innovate quickly, build big, focus on commercial infrastructure, and “go around the world and copy.” Brook establishes similar patterns of development, from the eighteenth century to the present day, in St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Bombay. Through the stories of these four cities, he sketches a history of empires pulled along by their “future cities.” The cities have more in common than just their formative visions. They are cosmopolitan; their development outpaces that of surrounding areas; they exhibit stark wealth disparity. In all of them, grand design and newcomers, both villagers and foreigners, created a frisson that Brook tracks through boom and bust for hundreds of years. As a history of Russia, China, or India, the book suffers from the limitations inherent in viewing vast empires through a localized lens, but Brook presents an interesting thesis about the city’s role in fomenting political change in the modern era. ♦

Sign up to get the best of The New Yorker delivered to your inbox every day